Tag: lgbtq+

donnapaella:

Why do people act like oppression dynamics never existed within the LGBT+ community before the whole ace discourse ?

A few exemples that we all already knows but apparently everyone is ignoring it: cis people, even non straight cis people, have a privilege over trans people. Or a white LGBT+ person is privileged compared to their non-white counterpart. Or a wealthy one is privileged compared to their poor counterpart. Or an abled one, or an NT one, or, or…

There are numerous examples: there are oppression dynamics within the Pride, and many people are going to be in the same Pride as groups that oppress them in some way, without the oppressor’s legitimacy being questioned.

So when you claim a “”“”“"cishet”“”“”“ ace (heteromantic ace folks I guess, and aroace folks probably) is your oppressor, because they’re not going to be targeted for liking the same gender (but they ARE targeted for another reason, y’all keep in mind I’m trying to respond to exclusionists’ logic), you’re basically saying “no matter if you face an oppression I’m refusing to see, you’re oppressing ME by not being like me so go away”.

And trust me, if we all had to do that, trans folks would dump all of our asses.

They don’t fit in the hetero world, they face oppressions that are their own (I’m not going to list them because there are many other great posts about it and if you don’t know about it you just decided to ignore it) but these oppressions intersect a lot with other kinds of queerphobia (omg Donna wrote queer in their post, I’m calling the police), so, they belong at pride, because they, too, need that place to be proud of their identity and they, too, fight heteronormativity with us.

Do some of them belong to groups that are privileged compared to some of other LGBT+ folks ? Maybe, depending if they are white, cis, rich, abled, etc etc. But, again, so do many of us all.

Like. If we’re going to talk about privileges within the community, we’re going to talk about them all.

My own stance is that we don’t know enough about ace identities to make exclusionism justifiable. There’s been barely any academic work done about ace identities and what has been done has had flaws due to the lack of understanding academia has for non-straight identities (one study also looked at “sapiosexuals”…really???). There’s a concept in environmental science called the Precautionary Principle, which is defined as “in situations where we lack scientific knowledge, pick the stance that causes the least amount of harm” and that’s what I think the community should be following at this time. Meanwhile, I expect that once academia catches up to where the LGBTQ+ community is at that we will know more and people who have excluded ace identities will start to walk it back as they have with bi identities when similar research was conducted about us.

“Hearts Beat Loud” is the Quirky, Queer Rom-Com We All Deserve

moonisneveralone:

equalityspeaks:

A must-see! 

This young love comedy is about two queer women of colour — actually played by two young, out queer women of colour.

Hearts Beat Loud begins its nationwide rollout this weekend. You can check here for local listings and premiere dates.

You’re telling me the movie already exists ? I asked for this last week and it just exists ???

“Hearts Beat Loud” is the Quirky, Queer Rom-Com We All Deserve

that desexualization of pride is one of the reasons why i support ace exclusionism

pervocracy:

Nah, fuck off.  Ace people aren’t responsible for this.

The responsibility lies with:

1. Corporations, massively.  The price for having Citibank as a sponsor of your pride parade is that things are going to happen according to Citibank’s Friendly Community Standards (whether this is an explicit demand or not).  They’re going to field a big group of marchers celebrating rainbows and the word “pride,” but no elements of sexuality or rebellion.  And they’re going to put pressure–implicit or explicit–on the other groups in the parade to not do anything too wild under Citibank’s auspices.

Or they’re just going to stuff the parade with their groups–maybe Citibank on its own can’t change the whole parade, but when you’ve got Citibank and US Bank and Staples and Target all fielding groups that make up 90% of the parade by mass, that sort of sets a tone.  And that tone is “some queer people on their Best Behavior because HR is watching, some random vaguely-liberal corporate employees who wanted to be in a parade, and the biggest and most expensive displays seem to be celebrating the meteorological phenomenon of rainbows.”

2. To a much smaller extent, well-meaning handwringing over inclusiveness, but in a way that’s mostly not perpetrated by or for ace people.  There’s a much more general problem in social justice circles where being more concerned and more aware is always better, and this can be best performed by criticizing everything to death.  Which has its role and I’m not advocating for being unconcerned and unaware, but… we’re lacking in processes for recognizing when excessive restraint is also problematic, even though it is.

The difference between “fine, be gay, but don’t shove it down my throat” and “PDA and nudity at Pride is problematic in the glorification of conventional body standards, exposure to minors, the historical association of homosexuality and predatory hypersexuality, erasure of the dangers of HIV/STIs and sexual assault, and alienation of people who are sex-repulsed or anxious about sex for various reasons” is–well, it’s a lot, but you sort of end up in the same place, don’t you?

Some of those reasons are actually very good, but sometimes good isn’t good enough.  They have to be good in a way that outweighs the harm done by desexualizing Pride, and I’m not convinced that they are.  Or at least I think people should put more thought into explicitly making compromises between competing needs, rather than always erring on the side of offending nobody by doing nothing.

(related: my frustration with Tumblr for picking queer media and creators to death while giving a free pass to much worse straight people, and maybe nothing that’s said is wrong per se, but… the overall effect is a discourse that’s mostly about how awful various queer things are, and if I wanted that I could get it from Mike Pence)

I’ve written more paragraphs on this, mostly because it’s complicated and I don’t want to totally dismiss the relevant concerns, but don’t forget it’s like 10% of the problem.  The Citibank Family Friendly Rainbow Fest is 90%.

Inclusionism/Exclusionism is largely not a thing in the community except on the internet. I volunteer at an LGBTQ+ community center and most people are simply unfamiliar with ace people and are like “oh okay” when I explain. It makes zero sense to me considering how small of a minority the ace community is that they’d have such an influence on Pride. I agree with the OP that the above mentioned factors are more prevalent. I’d include respectability politics (as in, ‘I’m LGBTQ+ but I hate x group of LGBTQ+ people at Pride becaues they take it too far") and also people who hate kink and think those who practice it should disappear from the public eye as other factors.

tomcats-and-tophats:

Bi women who would only date a man if he was also bi are not inherently fetishizing mlm. It’s okay to only want to be with someone who understands what it’s like to live under homophobia.

Wanting partners who relate to your experiences isn’t the same thing as promoting harmful media or turning an identity into a kink

cuntybisexual:

in light of this #droptheB hash tag that reactionary psyops have begun, i just want to remind everyone that bi/trans solidarity has always existed. we have always fought for each other’s visibility and safety and rights and we have always formed community with each other. bi history and trans history aren’t mutually exclusive threads – they’re intertwined. you go back through various lgbt archives, such as the archive of the san francisco bay area bisexual network’s magazine, and you’ll see calls for bi/trans solidarity from the 80′s and 90′s. monica helms, the trans woman who created the trans pride flag, was inspired to do so after talking to michael page, the bi man who created the bisexual pride flag. we’ve always been there for each other and that won’t change just because reactionaries hate us and want to divide and conquer. 

and a special shout out to: trans and nb bisexuals, who are part of both communities. i’m sorry that this is happening, but i’m especially sorry that reactionaries are trying to rip you apart between your communities.  

posi-pan:

just so people know, there’s a “drop the b” hashtag going around about how it should be “lgpt” instead of “lgbt”

and I’d just like to say:

  • it was started by 4chan trolls
  • it does not come from trans, non-binary, or pan people
  • it is meant to cause fighting within the community
  • don’t let it

darklittlestories:

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway:

leproblematique:

fierceawakening:

dysphoria-privilege:

sullengirlalmlghty:

tockthewatchdog:

tockthewatchdog:

not to be a bitter asshole but the overwhelming “my gf is perfect and relationships between women are are all pure and perfect” culture on here is annoying. there are a lot of us out here being used, cheated on, dumped, abused, having communication issues and shitty breakups, and lesbian culture is not a binary of “im alone and pining after an imaginary perfect gf” or “i have a perfect gf”. it does baby lesbians and bi women a disservice. don’t feel like there’s something wrong with you if you have bad dates or weird dates or women treat you like shit or trespass your boundaries and in general don’t act like perfect magical moon princesses and your relationship isn’t a magical dream of cat ownership and cuddling. women are people too, and that means women are flawed too. there are wonderful women out there and you will find one someday to build your life with but there are a lot of assholes out there too, you’re not failing at anything if you date one of them. and you have the capability of being a shitty asshole too!

Boy there’s a lot of defensive creeps on this post!

“I’m a lesbian in a perfect relationship and I would never downplay that so that other lesbians aren’t jealous that’s ridiculous“

jesus, yeah this is definitely about jealousy not lesbians and bi women in toxic or straight up abusive relationships feeling isolated and wanting to change that!

A key reason why some believe LGBTQ IPV to be rare may be due to an assumption that LGBTQ people are inherently nonviolent. This may be particularly the case for sexual minority women. In contrast to the aggression often associated with culturally prominent masculinity norms, many lesbian women are socialized to perceive relationships involving two women as a peaceful and ideal “lesbian utopia.” Unfortunately, this powerful stereotype can impede lesbian female victims’ ability to recognize that a partner’s behavior is in fact abusive rather than normal.26 For example, in reflecting on her same-gender IPV victimization back in the 1990s, Julie describes the ubiquity of the lesbian utopia ideal in the United Kingdom that prevented her from discussing the abuse with anyone: “Well it was during a period where everyone was just raving about erm how brilliant woman-to-woman relationships were and also I don’t think anyone believed that one woman could do that to another woman—there was just no, no sense of reality around that at all. There was sort of a political euphoria about lesbianism at the time; well not even lesbianism, just woman-to-woman relationships.”27 Echoing these sentiments, a victim of female same-gender IPV in the United States explains the powerful influence the lesbian utopia ideal had on her ability to recognize the abuse: “No—I thought, well, I just thought that it was fine because we were girls, like, and girls don’t hurt each other like that. So I just thought that it was the way it was supposed to be.”28

– LGBTQ Intimate Partner Violence: Lessons for Policy, Practice, and Research by Adam M. Messinger

An example of what can happen when a group of people are glorified

This is exactly how I got into an emotionally abusive relationship. My other bi friends had told me “relationships with women are better because there aren’t power dynamics like there are between women and men.”

I doublethought (doublethunk?) my way back to “this isn’t a power dynamic” every time I felt demeaned and afraid, because “there are no power dynamics between women,” so I couldn’t have been living one.

Lesbianism-as-purity stuff terrifies me now, y’all.

I’ve spoken about this before. One of the advantages of hands-on, community-building LGBTQIAP+ activism is that I had the opportunity to talk directly to hundreds of people and counsel them on a whole variety of concrete issues. By far the thorniest problem I was faced with was intimate partner violence within relationships between women. Many abused women came to me in emotionally fragile states, yet adamantly refused to do anything more than talk with me in confidence – such as speak to one of our official counselors or to a support group, never bloody mind even the idea of filing any kind of charges against their girlfriends! 

Within the community, they were taught the idea that same-gender relationships between women were not only inherently ‘better’ and had ‘less capacity for containing abuse’ than other kinds of relationships (particularly straight ones), but that ‘airing their dirty laundry in public’ (talking publicly about their abuse) would be a damaging act toward the LGBTQIAP+ community as a whole, as it would give homophobes more dirt to fling in our direction. Given my disgust toward everything related toward purity politics and respectability politics, you can imagine what my stance toward the above is – I value truth, transparency and not throwing domestic abuse survivors under the fucking bus a hell of a lot more than I value us presenting a sanitized, artificially clean image to the world, when we should all know by now that our most irrational detractors would continue to hate us even if we were the human incarnations of purity! There’s a subset of people you just cannot win over and I’d rather have them crow like broken records about the problems within the community, rather than glossing over said problems and doing a hell of a lot of damage to young queer people in the process!  

Before anyone starts screaming – the takeaway people should be taking from this isn’t ‘so now I can’t talk about my perfect WLW relationship?’ or ‘you people want to trash the image of lesbians!’ or other barmy shit like that. No, the message is ‘same-sex relationships between women fall on a scale that’s much more complex than ‘shades of soft, pastel-pink’, the way Tumblr all too often presents them.’ Queer women are people. Queer women are humans and as such, we’re as fallible and mistake-prone as anyone else on this Earth, no matter how much we might pretend that we’re some sort of ‘evolved form of person.’ We’re not exempt from perpetuating toxic, abusive models within our relationships and trying to ignore that does us all an enormous disservice.  

Okay. Okay. I reblogged this post already when no one was quoting the bullshit responses to it.

But as someone who personally protected my abusers for 20 years because of the fear that their abuse would be blamed on their sexuality and so my own sexuality would become both the reason I was abused and proof I was abusive myself, I saw red.

Do you know how many women I saw growing up desperately trying to deal with the fact that a small community meant they couldn’t escape their abusers, but it was impossible to go to the cops or anyone else because the whole community would turn on them saying “you’re just giving them more evidence we’re evil!”

Abuse in our community is massively underreported and is fucking deadly because of how vulnerable so many of us are due to prior abuse. It is ~critical~ that we acknowledge this in ways that are actually beneficial to the people being abused.

Being a bi/pan woman who just dragged myself out of a ‘getting really toxic and emotionally manipulative’ relationship with a woman, all of the lesbian purity posts on queer Tumblr feel like stingy little knives of microaggression.

Reblogging this because human relationships are goddamn complicated. Queer women aren’t all magical moon goddesses or evil succubi. We are human, and capable of all of the entire range of human beauty and cruelty.